January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…
Category: Literary criticism
Ezra Pound: Prototypical Beat? – Michael Washburn
We today tend to remember Ezra Pound (1885-1972) for the immense density and erudition of his work. Pound’s many preoccupations included Confucius, medieval China, Bertrand de Born, the Provençal period, ancient Egypt, the beauty of the Farsi tongue, and his fellow early twentieth-century modernists. Of course, we also remember many unpleasant things about the man,…
On Appearance: Disordered eating and the body, Kelsey Osgood’s ‘How to Disappear Completely’, and how language makes illness appear to us — Lizzie Hudson
An exploration of the impact of literature about eating disorders on readers. TW: Discussion of eating disorders and self harm.
It’s hard being a poet in 2020 – David Giles
It’s hard being a poet in 2020
Which is when this will be published
If you have the GUTS to publish it
Which I doubt
Being bitter & twisted
REVIEW – The Liars’ Asylum (Stories) by Jacob M. Appel – Vanessa Braganza
Appel turns his professional interest in the workings of the human mind to a narrative exploration of the reasons we tell lies.
A Corpus Stylistics Study of the Biased Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre – Yifan Zhai
Yifan Zhai is a young critic from Beijing. She is currently pursuing an MA in English Literature in Beihang University, China. She used to be in an exchange program to the St.Mary’s University of Texas, USA, where she developed an interest in studying and criticizing literature. Her focus is reading the classics with new…
Women on the Ward: Implications of Confinement and Collective Identity in Selima Hill’s Lou-Lou – Imogen Shaw
Imogen Shaw is an environmental lobbyist and final year Creative Writing MA student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including The Mays and Blueprint magazine. She is passionate about social advocacy and lives in a London flat with her fiancée and a tenacious family of mice. You can follow…
Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time – Malcolm St Hill
Image: A Star Shell – Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1916 Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle, Australia and is a poet, reviewer and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly the work of Australian soldier-poets. Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time The Australian poet and…
The Chore of the Text – Robert Boucheron
This essay by Robert Boucheron is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, New York. He has worked as an architect in New York City and since 1987 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His short stories and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Fiction International, London Journal…
To what extent do experiences of conception and/or infertility challenge mind/body dualism? – Frances Tuoriniemi
Image: Keith Haring – Fertility, 1983 Frances Tuoriniemi is a final year English and Creative Writing undergraduate student at the University of Birmingham, who will be continuing on to study an MA in Writing at Warwick next year. They particularly enjoy work that plays with color and feels alive, work that moves and shifts to…
The Haunted Present: Using the Past as an Emotional Context – Kat Hausler
Photo by Daniel Wander on Pexels Kat Hausler is a graduate of New York University and Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the recipient of a Baumeister Fellowship. Her debut novel Retrograde was recently published by Meerkat Press. She writes and translates in Berlin. The Haunted Present: Using the Past as an Emotional Context In James…
POETRY REVIEW: straya by Paul Summers – Malcolm St Hill
Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle, Australia and is a poet, reviewer and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly the work of Australian soldier-poets. This is a modified version of a review which appeared in Rochford Street Review in December 2017. straya by Paul Summers (Smokestack Books, 2017) The term…
